The Inside Story Of How Obama Turned On A Dime and Decided To Intervene in Libya

On Monday, it appeared that there was no way the United
States would "intervene" in Libya.

After what was described as a "contentious" meeting of his
national security advisors on Tuesday night, President Obama
decided to do just that.

Foreign Policy magazine's blog, The Cable, has the back
story:

The key decision was made by President Barack
Obama himself at a Tuesday evening senior-level meeting
at the White House, which was described by two administration
officials as "extremely contentious." Inside that meeting,
officials presented arguments both for and against attacking
Libya. Obama ultimately sided with the interventionists. His
overall thinking was described to a group of experts who had been
called to the White House to discuss the crisis in Libya only
days earlier.

"This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and
our values," a senior administration official said at the
meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama
himself. The president was referring to the broader change going
on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign
policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.

But Obama's stance in Libya differs significantly from his
strategy regarding the other Arab revolutions. In Egypt and
Tunisia, Obama chose to rebalance the American stance gradually
backing away from support for President Hosni
Mubarak and Zineel-Abidine Ben Ali and allowing the popular
movements to run their course. In Yemen and Bahrain, where the
uprisings have turned violent, Obama has not even uttered a word
in support of armed intervention - instead pressing those regimes
to embrace reform on their own. But in deciding to attack Libya,
Obama has charted an entirely new strategy, relying on U.S. hard
power and the use of force to influence the outcome of Arab
events.